NEW DELHI, April 7: Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has said that she could be gunned down at the tarmac when she returns home this year but the risk would not deter her from making an attempt to participate in the general elections.

In a revised edition of her autobiography “Daughter of the East” — excerpts of which were made available here on Saturday — she also accused President Gen Pervez Musharraf of advising her, when he was a major general in 1996, to invade and capture Srinagar, a proposal she rejected.

“So as I prepare to return to an uncertain future in Pakistan in 2007, I fully understand the stakes not only for myself, and my country, but the entire world. I realise I can be arrested… I can be gunned down on the airport tarmac when I land,” Ms Bhutto says. But return she will.

“I do what I have to do, and am determined to fulfil my pledge to the people of Pakistan to stand by them in their democratic aspirations…. Democracy in Pakistan is not just important for Pakistanis, it is for the entire world.”

Of her conversation with Gen Musharraf in 1996 she writes: “I once again heard how Pakistan would take Srinagar if only I gave the orders to do so. Musharraf concluded the briefing with the words that a ceasefire would be in place and Pakistan would be in control of Srinagar, the capital of Indian-held Kashmir. I asked him ‘And what next?’

“He was surprised by my question, and said ‘Next we will put the flag of Pakistan on Srinagar Parliament’. ‘And what next?’ I asked the general. ‘Next you will go to the United Nations and tell them that Srinagar is in Pakistan's control’. ‘And what next?’ I pushed on. I could see General Musharraf had not been prepared for this grilling and was getting flustered. He said, ‘And you will tell them to change the map of the world taking into consideration the new geographical realities.’

“ ‘And do you know what the United Nations will tell me?’ I looked at Gen Musharraf straight in the eye, as the army chief sat silently by and the room grew still, and pointedly said, ‘They will pass a Security Council resolution condemning us and demanding that we unilaterally withdraw from Srinagar, and we will have got nothing for our efforts but humiliation and isolation.’ I then abruptly ended the meeting.”

Earlier on December 2, 1988 the then Indian prime minister V.P. Singh had told her that Pakistan was arming and training terrorists, an accusation she denied. “What I did not mention was the offer received from Afghan Arabs and the Pakistan militant groups in 1990. Using the good offices of the ISI, they informed me that ‘one hundred thousand battle-hardened mujahideen were willing to go into Kashmir to assist Kashmiri freedom movement and somehow were confident about defeating the much larger Indian army. Knowing that any such transnational support would hurt rather than help Kashmiri people, I vetoed the idea.”

The then army chief Gen Aslam Beg had also asked her to approve a new policy. “He said if Islamabad went on ‘offensive defensive’, it could capture Srinagar. General Beg told me, ‘Prime minister, you just give the order and your men will take Srinagar and you will wear the crown of victory and of glory.’ I thought he had lost all sense of reality.”

According to the excerpts published in the Indian weekly magazine Outlook, Ms Bhutto makes it clear in the book that she never liked or respected Gen Musharraf. When she was prime minister, she writes, “I declined to make him (Musharraf) my military secretary. We initially refused his promotion because of his suspected though unproven links to the ethnic, often violent party known as the Mohajir Qaumi Movement.”

ISI proposed an Afghanistan-Pakistan confederation after the fall of President Najibullah in Kabul “so that there will be no borders between us.” Ms Bhutto rejected the idea of a confederation with Afghanistan. She said this would “give the Indians an excuse to intervene in Afghanistan. And without American, Saudi and Iranian support it will land us in bigger trouble.”

In 1989, after Osama bin Laden had left for Saudi Arabia following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, he was asked by ISI to return to help overthrow her democratic government. Osama, she says, paid $10 million to buy off her political supporters. The ISI chose Ramzi Yusuf, who planned the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993, to assassinate her during her election campaign in 1990, Ms Bhutto says.

“I really do think there is at least some degree of causality that most major terrorist attacks took place when the extremists did not have to deal with a democratic Pakistani government…. (T)his includes both the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre., the Bombay blasts, the Indian parliament attack, the attack on the US embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen.”

Her government was dismissed for the second time on November 4, 1996. That brought in Nawaz Sharif. “Under Nawaz Sharif the Taliban changed colour and character. They killed Iranian diplomats and allowed bin Laden, in 1988, to declare war on the West from their (Afghanistan) soil.” She says Mr Nawaz Sharif was removed by the army over differences with the ISI over Kargil.